On Something (Dodo Press) (2 page)

MISS GROSVENOR (
sweetly and, far off
): Is that Mr. Haverton?

  REV. A. HAVERTON: Yes! yes! yes! yes!…
Was that the bell for prayers?

  MISS GROSVENOR (
again
): Yes? Is that Mr. Haverton? Oh! Yes!
I think it is…. I'll see—I'll ask Matilda.

      (
A pause, during which the
REV. A. HAVERTON
        
is in a qualm
.)

  MISS GROSVENOR (
rustling back
): Matilda says it
    
is
the bell for prayers.

      (
They all come filing into the study and arranging the chairs.
        As they enter
MISS HARVEY,
the guest, treads heavily on
        MATILDA'S foot.
)

MISS HARVEY: Matilda? Was that you? I
beg
your pardon.

MATILDA (
limping
): Granted, I'm sure, miss!

  MRS. HAVERTON (
whispering to the
REV. A. HAVERTON): Do not read
    the Creed!
Miss Harvey is a Unitarian.
I should suggest some simple form of prayer,
Some heartfelt word of charity and peace
Common to every Christian.

REV. A. HAVERTON (
in a deep voice
): Let us pray.

Curtain.

A dear friend of mine (John Abdullah Capricorn, to give him his full
name) was commandeered by a publisher last year to write a book for £10.
The work was far advanced when an editor offered him £15 and his expenses
to visit the more desperate parts of the Sahara Desert, to which spots he
at once proceeded upon a roving commission. Whether he will return or no
is now doubtful, though in March we had the best hopes. With the month of
May life becomes hard for Europeans south of the Atlas, and when my poor
dear friend was last heard of he was chancing his popularity with a tribe
of Touaregs about two hundred miles south of Touggourt.

Under these circumstances I was asked to look through his notebook and see
what could be done; and I confess to a pleased surprise…. It would have
been a very entertaining book had it been published. It will be a very
entertaining book if it is published.

Capricorn seems to have prepared a hotchpotch of information of human
follies, of contrasts, and of blunt stupidities of which he intended
to make a very entertaining series of pages. I have not his talent for
bringing such things together, but it may amuse the reader if I merely
put in their order one or two of the notes which most struck me.

I find first, cut out of a newspaper and pasted into the book (many of
his notes are in this form), the following really jovial paragraph:

"Archdeacon Blunderbuss (Blunderbuss is not the real name; I suppress
that lest Capricorn's widow should lose her two or three pounds, in case
the poor fellow has really been eaten). Archdeacon Blunderbuss was more
distinguished as a scholar than as a Divine. He was a very poor preacher
and never managed to identify himself with any party. Nevertheless, in
1895 the Prime Minister appointed him to a stall in Shoreham Cathedral as
a recognition of his great learning and good work at Durham. Two years
later the rectory of St. Vacuums becoming vacant and it being within the
gift of Archdeacon Blunderbuss, he excited general amazement and much
scandal by presenting himself to the living."

There the paragraph ends. It came in an ordinary society paper. It bore
no marks of ill-will. It came in the midst of a column of the usual
silly adulation of everybody and everything; how it got there is of no
importance. There it stood and the keen eye of Capricorn noted it and
treasured it for years.

I will make no comment upon this paragraph. It may be read slowly or
quickly, according to the taste of the reader; it is equally delicious
either way.

The next excerpt I find in the notebook is as follows:

"More than 15,000,000 visits are paid annually to London pawnbrokers.

"Jupiter is 1387 times as big as the earth, but only 300 times as heavy.

"The world's coal mines yield 400,000,000 tons of coal a year.

"The value of the pictures in the National Gallery is about £1,250,000."

This tickled Capricorn—I don't know why. Perhaps he thought the style
disjointed or perhaps he had got it into his head that when this
information had been absorbed by the vulgar they would stand much where
they stood before, and be no nearer the end of man nor the accomplishment
of any Divine purpose in their creation. Anyhow he kept it, and I think
he was wise to keep it. One cannot keep everything of that kind that
is printed, so it is well to keep a specimen. Capricorn had, moreover,
intended to perpetuate that specimen for ever in his immortal prose—pray
Heaven he may return to do so!

I next find the following excerpt from an evening paper:

"No more gallant gentleman lives on the broad acres of his native England
than Brigadier-General Sir Hammerthrust Honeybubble, who is one of the
few survivors of the great charge at Tamulpuco, a feat of arms now
half forgotten, but with which England rang during the Brazilian War.
Brigadier-General, or, as he then was, plain Captain Hammerthrust
Honeybubble, passed through five Brazilian batteries unharmed, and came
back so terribly hacked that his head was almost severed from his body.
Hardly able to keep his seat and continually wiping the blood from his
left eye, he rode back to his troop at a walk, and, in spite of pursuit,
finally completed his escape. Sir Hammerthrust, we are glad to learn, is
still hale and hearty in his ninety-third year, and we hope he may see
many more returns of the day upon his patrimonial estate in the Orkneys."

To this excerpt I find only one marginal note in Capricorn's delicate
and beautiful handwriting: "What day?" But whether this referred to some
appointment of his own I was unable to discover.

I next find a certain number of cuttings which I think cannot have been
intended for the book at all, but must have been designed for poor
Capricorn's "Oxford Anthology of Bad Verse," which, just before he
left England, he was in process of preparing for the University Press.
Capricorn had a very fine sense of bad taste in verse, and the authorities
could have chosen no one better suited for the duty of editing such a
volume. I must not give the reader too much of these lines, but the
following quatrain deserves recognition and a permanent memory:

Napoleon hoped that all the world would fall beneath his sway. He failed
in this ambition; and where is he to-day? Neither the nations of the East
nor the nations of the West Have thought the thing Napoleon thought was to
their interest.

This is enormous. As philosophy, as history, as rhetoric, as metre, as
rhythm, as politics, it is positively enormous. The whole poem is a
wonderful poem, and I wish I had space for it here. It is patriotic and it
is written about as badly as a poem could conceivably be written. It is a
mournful pleasure to think that my dear friend had his last days in the
Old Country illuminated by such a treasure. It is but one of many, but I
think it is the best.

Another extract which catches my eye is drawn from the works of one in a
distant and foreign land. Yet it was worth preserving. This personage,
Tindersturm by name, issued a pamphlet which fell under the regulations,
the very strict regulations, of the Prussian Government, by which any
one of its subjects who says or prints anything calculated to stir
up religious or racial strife within the State is subject to severe
penalties. Now those severe penalties had fallen upon Tindersturm and
he had been imprisoned for some years according to the paragraph that
followed the extract I am about to give. That the aforesaid Tindersturm
did indeed tend to "stir up religious and racial strife," nay, went
somewhat out of his way to do it, will be clear enough when you read the
following lines from his little broadsheet:

"It is time for us to go for this caddish alien sect. If on your way home
from the theatre you meet the blue-eyed, tow-haired, lolloping gang,
whether they be youths or ladies, go right up to them and give them a
smart smack, left and right, a blow in the eye; and lift your foot and
give the tow-headed ones a kick. In this way must we begin the business.
My Fatherland, wake up!"

To this extract poor Capricorn has added the word "Excellent," and the
same comment he makes upon the following conclusion to a letter written
to a religious paper and dealing with some politician or other who had
done something which the correspondent did not like:

"That his eyes may be opened
while he lives
is the prayer of

"Yours truly,

From such a series it is a recreation to turn to the little social
paragraphs which gave Capricorn such acute and such continual joy; as, for
instance, this:

"Mrs. Harry Bacon wishes it to be known that she has ceased to have any
connection whatsoever with the Boudoir for Lost Dogs. Her address is still
Hermione House, Bourton-on-the-Water Fenton Marsh, Worcester."

There is much more in the notebook with which I could while away the
reader's time did space permit of it. I find among the very last entries,
for instance, this:

"It was a strenuous and thrilling contest. Some terrible blows were
exchanged. In the last round, however, Schmidt landed his opponent a very
nasty one under the chin, stretching him out lifeless and breaking his
elbow; whereupon the prize was awarded him."

To this joyous gem Capricorn has added a whole foison of annotations. He
asks at the end: "Which was 'him'? Important." And he underlines in red
ink the word "however," perhaps as mysterious a copulative as has ever
appeared in British prose. I should add that Capricorn himself was an
ardent sportsman and very rarely missed any of the first-class events of
the ring, though personally he did not box, and on the few occasions when
I have seen the exercise forced upon him in the public streets he showed
the greatest distaste to this form of athletics.

Lastly, I find this note with which I must close: it is taken from the
verbatim report of a great case in the courts, now half forgotten, but ten
years ago the talk of London:

"The witness then said that he had been promised an independence for life
if he could discover the defendant in the act of enclosing any part of
the land, or any document or order of his involving such an enclosure. He
therefore watched the defendant regularly from June, 1896, to the middle
of July, 1900. He also watched the defendant's father and mother, three
boys, married daughter, grandmother and grandfather, his two married
sisters, his brother, his agent, and his agent's wife—but he had
discovered nothing."

That such a sentence should have been printed in the English language and
delivered by an English mouth in an English witness-box was enough for
Capricorn. Give him that alone for intellectual food in his desert lodge
and he was happy.

Shall I tempt Providence by any further extracts? … It is difficult to
tear oneself away from such a feast. So let me put in this very last,
really the last, by way of savoury. There it is in black and white and no
one can undo it: not all her piety, nor all her wit. It dates from the
year 1904, when, Heaven knows, the internal combustion engine and its
possibilities were not exactly new, and I give it word for word:

"The Duchess is, moreover, a pioneer in the use of the motor-car. She
finds it an agreeable and speedy means of conveyance from her country seat
to her town house, and also a very practical way of getting to see her
friends at week-ends. She has been heard to complain, however, that a
substitute for the pneumatic tyre less liable to puncture than it is would
be a priceless boon."

There! There! May they all rest in peace! They have added to the gaiety of
mankind.

You will often hear it said that it is astonishing such and such work
should be present and enduring in the world, and yet the name of its
author not known; but when one considers the variety of good work and the
circumstances under which it is achieved, and the variety of taste also
between different times and places, one begins to understand what is at
first so astonishing.

There are writers who have ascribed this frequent ignorance of ours to all
sorts of heroic moods, to the self-sacrifice or the humility of a whole
epoch or of particular artists: that is the least satisfactory of the
reasons one could find. All men desire, if not fame, at least the one poor
inalienable right of authorship, and unless one can find very good reasons
indeed why a painter or a writer or a sculptor should deliberately have
hidden himself one must look for some other cause.

Among such causes the first two, I think, are the multiplicity of good
work, and its chance character. Not that any one ever does very good work
for once and then never again—at least, such an accident is extremely
rare—but that many a man who has achieved some skill by long labour does
now and then strike out a sort of spark quite individual and separate from
the rest. Often you will find that a man who is remembered for but one
picture or one poem is worth research. You will find that he did much
more. It is to be remembered that for a long time Ronsard himself was
thought to be a man of one poem.

The multiplicity of good work also and the way in which accident helps it
is a cause. There are bits of architecture (and architecture is the most
anonymous of all the arts) which depend for their effect to-day very
largely upon situation and the process of time, and there are a thousand
corners in Europe intended merely for some utility which happen almost
without deliberate design to have proved perfect: this is especially true
of bridges.

Then there is this element in the anonymity of good work, that a man very
often has no idea how good the work is which he has done. The anecdotes
(such as that famous one of Keats) which tell us of poets desiring to
destroy their work, or, at any rate, casting it aside as of little value,
are not all false. We still have the letter in which Burns enclosed "Scots
wha' hae," and it is curious to note his misjudgment of the verse; and
side by side with that kind of misjudgment we have men picking out for
singular affection and with a full expectation of glory some piece of
work of theirs to which posterity will have nothing to say. This is
especially true of work recast by men in mature age. Writers and painters
(sculptors luckily are restrained by the nature of their art—unless they
deliberately go and break up their work with a hammer) retouch and change,
in the years when they have become more critical and less creative, what
they think to be the insufficient achievements of their youth: yet it is
the vigour and the simplicity of their youthful work which other men often
prefer to remember. On this account any number of good things remain
anonymous, because the good writer or the good painter or the good
sculptor was ashamed of them.